eminem

Every year for what’s now been 10 years running, Lollapalooza has invaded the grounds of Grant Park in Chicago, IL and grips the city in an awesome and unavoidable way. In the week leading up to the festival, you can feel the metro area swelling up, as if to prepare for the oncoming chaos. And regardless of what you thought of this year’s lineup (meh), Lolla is always a party full of spectacular moments.

This year’s fest was no exception to this rule. It’s a tall task to sum up 72-hours of music, mud, and general mayhem in just 7 small yet encapsulating moments, but I did my best for everybody’s fleeting attention spans.

Here are The 7 Sweetest Moments from Lollapalooza 2014 below.

7. Portugal. The Man Covering It’s Always Sunny’s “Dayman”

Covers can be cheesy and predictable. Sure, we’ve all heard the indie band who does a rendition of an old Snoop Dog song or something and people go nuts over it. But, what about when a band dramatically covers a song from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia? Awesome.

6. Toothless Gosling and Prison Mike Sinage

Festival signage usually falls within the realm of inside joke or completely and randomly awesome. These are both examples of the later.

5. Andre 3000 Bringing Girls On Stage To Shake It Like A Polaroid Picture

It’s impossible to not dance when “Hey Ya” comes on. It’s perfect. To prove this point, Andre 3000 brought some Beyonce’s and Lucy Lu’s on stage to get down to his now classic hit. I’m not complaining.

4. Grouplove Covering Beastie Boys’s “Sabotage”

Sooo, remember that thing I said about indie bands covering hip-hop songs earlier? Yeah, still awesome.

With Em and Ri kicking off a tour in Detroit soon, many expected the duo to share the stage at some point during the legendary emcee’s Lolla set. Well, it happened and it was especially awesome that she stuck around for “Stan.”

1. Chance Bringing Out R. Kelly for “Ignition (Remix)”

Chance’s set was something of a momentous event. A hometown kid headlining Perry’s stage with a crowd that arguably rivaled next door neighbor headliners Kings of Leon and Skrillex. And then Chano brought out another Chicago legend just to put icing on the cake. Nailed it.

Aaaand here we have Eminem‘s latest offering, the Billy Squire-sampling “Berzerk” off of his upcoming album Marshall Mathers LP2, due out this November. And I love it. I was pretty lukewarm about the first leak “Survival,” which sounded a lot like that ’09 bullshit Em, but this Rick Rubin-produced track has a huge Beastie Boys-type feel to it and I’m here for it. If the rest of MMLP2 has Em coming for throats like this, consider it copped.

First off, happy Monday. I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted a Mashup Monday, but I hope yall can forgive me. Now that that’s behind us, here’s our first mashup. It’s by our dude Ricky Cervantes and it got Drake, Krewlla, Kanye West, Lil Wayne and Eminem all on one track and it sounds amazing.

Second, bet you never thought you’d hear Kendrick and Katy Perry on the same track? Particularly not after meeting angry kid Kendrick on “Control.” Ah but alas, The White Panda wanted it to happen, so it did.

Third,Arjun sent me this little gem today, in perfect time for Mashup Monday. The Tutankhamun Brothersfound a way to blend Kanye West and The Beatles in a way that sometimes (and frankly more times than I would have expected) actually sounds decent. Not quite Danger Mouse/The Grey Album status, but this is good stuff.

After getting a sneak peek in the Call of Duty: Ghosts commercial, Eminem dropped the full version of his latest track “Survival.” It sounds a bit too much like his Recovery bullshit if you ask me, but Slim is still spitting hard. I assume this guitar-heavy track will appear on his upcoming album, which will be coming sooner or later, I guess.

Haven’t done a Mashup Monday in a hot minute, but the time has come, my friends! Back on my grind, and in need of some good party tunes, so why not turn to mashups, naw mean? Hit the jump for a whole list of the best mashups I could get my hands on.

Ice-T is releasing a new documentary entitled Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap, and here we have two short clips from the documentary. In the top video, Kanye Speaks on his writing process while writing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and in the video below Eminem drops a short freestyle. Bottom video is the official trailer.

With honesty and a star-studded guest list, I have huge expectations for Something From Nothing. Look for it to drop in theaters on June 15th.

Just as with the rest of the world, the music world goes in cycles. Artists creating hit songs today are often building off of their predecessors’ creations. Sometimes I hear a song and think to myself ‘Damn. What an incredible song. Sounds timeless.’ More often than not, it’s because they’re borrowing from a song that was created before their time. Ah, the art of sampling.

So often today, artists use samples that we come to know and love, and I think the origin of the sample often goes unnoticed. The idea of samples has always interested me, particularly in cases when producers dig up samples that I’ve never heard before and turn them into something suddenly so popular. I imagine producers going into old record collections, dusting off cases open cases of records, placing the vinyl on the record player, and hearing a snippet of a song that suddenly inspires them to create something with that bit of a song. I’d be interested to know what they listen for, and whether they’re often looking for something to begin with or they tend to find something while in the act of searching, but I assume each artist goes about it differently. If you’re reading this and you’ve been sample searching, leave a comment with your method of discovery. Either way, I thought I’d introduce (or re-introduce) you guys to some of the songs that have been sampled in popular music today, just so we can take a second to appreciate the origins of those clips.

1. Perhaps the textbook case today. AVICII samples Etta James in his hit song “Levels.” (Disclaimer: Pretty Lights had sampled it before in his song “Finally Moving,” but the song didn’t take off as rapidly as “Levels.”)

3. In some examples, artists take a sample and flip it into something that sounds altogether different. In this example, though, Kanye West and Jay-Z stick pretty close to the original in their sampling Otis Redding in their song “Otis.”

6. Bet you think that LMFAO knocked it out of the park with their “Party Rock Anthem,” hm? It’s cool, they did. But they had the help of Steve Winwood and his original song “Valerie.” (Sample appears at the 1:02 mark.)

8. Eminem dug into the 1975 records to pull out Labi Siffre‘s “I Got The” for his popular song “My Name Is.” Incredible original song, and great use of the sample by Marshall Mathers. (Sample can be heard at the 2:10 mark.)

9. One of my favorite songs recently is Gotye‘s “Somebody That I Used To Know (ft. Kimbra).” I was fooled originally, thinking this was 100% Gotye’s creation. Turns out, they sampled a Latin song from 1967 by a man named Luiz Bonfa called “Seville.” Incredible find, Gotye and Kimbra!

10. This one is a bit of a more modern sample (2010), so it may to come as obvious to many, but it’s a great one nonetheless. Young rapper Mac Miller borrowed from popular indie-rock artist Sufjan Stevens in his jam “Donald Trump.”

My life was changed forever when I watched Conan O’Brien give the commencement address at Dartmouth’s graduation earlier this year. The speech gave me a new perspective on life and hope for the future. He said things that I knew I already knew but was afraid to admit. We were growing up. We were becoming “adults”. It’s scary. He ended the speech by quoting himself from months prior when he had to say goodbye to his dream job; he said, “Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen.”

Of course, I wasn’t in the crowd that day. I watched Coco’s speech on the Internet a few weeks later. I’m in high school. Fuck you.

My name is Arjun. I’m a new writer here at Sunset in the Rearview. I am definitely less “edgy” than that introduction made me seem to be. I plan on just consistently giving you guys good music, while keeping you on your toes and entertained.

My first musical memory was jumping on the sofa with my brother, listening to “What’s New Pussy Cat?” by Tom Jones. Looking back, the song seems pretty loaded with blatant sexism, but hey, it was my dad’s jam. Why it was his jam is beyond me, but pops probably had a good reason for playing it. This is also why I call all women “pussycats”.

At the turn of the millennium, I made a pretty drastic jump from Tom Jones to Marshall Mathers. Of course, I was 7 around this time, so I was listening to Eminem WAY younger than anybody should be allowed to listen to Eminem. Don’t blame my parents, though. They tried to stop my brother and I from downloading his songs. They just couldn’t. Shady was calling out to us…and so was Napster.

After Napster, I turned to iTunes. This is where I got my first real glimpse at “indie” music. I really got into The Kooks, Death Cab for Cutie, Beirut, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, and a handful of Jack Johnson knockoffs. One of my favorite songs ever also came from these iTunes years.

It was only last summer that I discovered the magic of the music blog. Before then, I just thought “blog” was a funny word. It still is. I don’t like it. It should be changed to something cooler. I don’t know what though. You guys…make it happen. Anyway, my first blog was Pretty Much Amazing. It was there I discovered some of my favorite artists, such as Childish Gambino, The Drums, and Chiddy Bang.

Lil Wayne seems to have a lost a bit of his talent since being released from jail. First he released 6’7, which personally I thought was just annoying. Then he jumped on Mike Posner’s track, “Bow Chicka Wow Wow,” and his verse was stale. He starts out alright on this one, but rhyming the entire song with “Anne” gets old once you’re 4 minutes deep. People are saying this is similar to Eminem’s “Stan,” but frankly it’s nothing like it at all. “Stan” was heart-wrenching, and this seems far from genuine or emotional. It’s kind of cheesy! He’s trying to say he’s sorry about Stan, so he’s writing to say he’s Anne’s number 1 fan…but this just wouldn’t happen, right? I don’t know, it’s just not doing it for me. What do yall think? Does it even compare?

GMC, short for Global Mashup Crew, is back with another collaborative mixtape! Their first release featured the top hits of 2010 all mashed up. Their next release, coming out tomorrow, puts the spotlight on one artist. Peep the video to see who it is. To be released exclusively on Sunset for tomorrow’s Mashup Monday.